The 64th pitch that a Twins pitcher threw Rhys Hoskins this weekend was a curveball. It looked almost like the 59th pitch, but that one was in the dirt and this appeared more appetizing. Hoskins pivoted his hips, swept his bat through the bottom of the zone, and whiffed. He yelled something to himself Sunday afternoon as he began the long walk back to the Phillies’ dugout.
Advertisement
He had seen enough from José Berríos to know.
“Sometimes the guy has better stuff than what you got in that at-bat,” Hoskins said. “You miss pitches and usually you’re out.”
In the sixth inning, Hoskins did not swing at the first four pitches Berríos threw him. The count was 2-2. The fifth pitch, the 69th one Hoskins saw from Minnesota pitchers, was a curveball down and away. He did not lunge. Ball three. Hoskins fouled off the next three. The plan, Berríos said afterward, was to attack Hoskins inside with fastballs and outside with breaking balls. It is a simple plan, one others have followed with success against Hoskins.
“I threw that pitch outside, the one that he hit out,” Berríos said. “But before that, I threw two (inside) pitches and he fouled them.”
“The longer the at-bat goes, the more pitches you see,” Hoskins said, “the more comfortable you are.”
He blistered the ninth pitch of the at-bat, a curveball on the edge of the strike zone, and it landed in the flower box along the left-field wall. He applied an in-game adjustment and corrected a hole in his swing. He waited long enough for the pitcher to make a mistake. How?
“Confidence, man,” Hoskins said.
This is what Hoskins, 26 years old and a veteran of 211 games, did this weekend: He batted 13 times and he reached base nine of those times. He crushed 2 home runs. He drew 3 walks. He drove home 7 of the 14 runs the Phillies scored. He saw a total of 78 pitches and he swung at six out of the strike zone. Of those six, he fouled off four. He missed two of them, both Berríos curveballs, and that was it.
“I thought Rhys’ at-bats through the whole series were excellent,” Phillies manager Gabe Kapler said. “That last one against Berríos was huge.”
Almost every player on the roster benefited from the Phillies’ winter makeover, but it might be Hoskins who stands to gain the most. In front of him, Bryce Harper. J.T. Realmuto waits behind. Hoskins looms in the middle — between the disciplined hitters and the contact hitters and the powerful hitters — and he is a mix of all of them. The burden, now, is spread.
Advertisement
“It lets you forget stuff a lot quicker,” Hoskins said. Remember the dismal stretches last season when the Phillies asked Hoskins to carry them. The times when he would chase bad breaking balls and the times when it looked like every failure was another weight chained to his legs.
He is the middle of it again, except it is a different place.
“A good place to be,” Hoskins said.
The 24th pitch of the weekend was a hanging slider, the kind of slider at the top of the zone that hitters like Hoskins punish. This was Friday night, in the fourth inning. It was raining and miserable. Hoskins flailed at the slider. He struck out to end an 11-pitch at-bat. He batted two more times Friday and he singled both times — one on a changeup at the bottom of the zone and another on a fastball down the middle. One of the singles scored three runs. His fielding error cost the Phillies a potential win last Wednesday in Washington. Two days later, he again felt confident.
He saw 17 more pitches in Saturday’s loss and he did not swing at one outside the zone. His 48th pitch of the weekend was a slider, below the knees, and Hoskins could have hacked at it. The tying runs were in scoring positions in the sixth inning. But it was not a strike, so Hoskins paused. He walked to load the bases. The Phillies failed to tie the game; Harper was eliminated at home plate in a double play, but Hoskins kept the rally moving.
There will be times like Friday or Saturday when he is just a piece of the offense. And there will be times like Sunday, when the Phillies needed him to be the entire rally. He can coexist in both places with less stress.
“He does a really good job of keeping his hands back and, as he leans down, he hits those off-speed pitches,” said veteran Minnesota pitcher Kyle Gibson, who studied Hoskins all weekend from the opposing dugout. “That’s what makes him tough to throw to. Unless you have a really slow curveball, you’re better off throwing a slower breaking ball than a fast one just because of how much he drags the bat through the zone.”
Advertisement
Unprompted, Twins outfielder Max Kepler, offered his scouting report.
“Hoskins, he’s good with that lean-out-front-of-balance flick,” Kepler said, “something you don’t see a lot.”
There were 10 balls hit harder in Sunday’s game than Hoskins’ decisive two-run homer. He hit a pitch out of the ballpark that right-handed hitters are not supposed to hit out — at least not to the pull side.
“I didn’t think, with the trajectory of it, that it was going to get out,” said Andrew McCutchen, who stood on third base. “Rhys is a big, strong man and he was able to showcase that with the homer.”
It is one thing to be big and strong. It is even rarer when batter’s box intellect raises that strength to a higher status. The Phillies have reveled in Hoskins’ homegrown story and they have witnessed glimpses of an exceptional baseball player. They have seen weekends like this before, but these stretches are elevated now because everything is more important.
A full-count Berríos curveball in the sixth inning of an April game, then, is more than just a pitch. When viewed in the scope of a weekend, or even an afternoon, it said so much about Hoskins in 2019.
“He had been throwing a lot of breaking balls all day,” Hoskins said. “Obviously, I had some pretty bad swings against him. It’s his best pitch; the biggest spot of the game. He just got too much of the plate. I think in that situation, a pitcher tends to go to his best pitch and rightly so. It’s a pretty good one.”
But, sometimes, good pitching doesn’t beat good hitting.
The Athletic’s Dan Hayes contributed to this report.
(Top photo: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)